Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

The shifting nature of domestic policies and agricultural trade between the United States and the European Union over the last several decades means that while some traditional trade irritants are no longer present, others have been introduced that will likely prove difficult to unravel in the context of trans-Atlantic bilateral negotiations. Whereas bilateral trade irritants previously centered on export subsidies and competition in third markets for commodities like wheat, now the disagreements primarily relate to non-tariff barriers (NTBs), including divergent scientific standards, food safety regulations and other issues that are hindrances to bilateral trade… But the difficulty in negotiating these issues is that, because they ostensibly relate to consumer health and safety, governments cannot easily make “trade-offs,” as they can with tariffs. Observers believe that this is the chief reason that the talks over agriculture promise to be so difficult.

Indeed. As we discuss in our paper, tariffs and other conventional trade barriers have fallen over the years, so the barriers that remain are more regulatory in nature, and more sensitive to negotiate. What we’re essentially left with is the difficult issues. They get to the heart of national sovereignty and, on a practical level, require the participation of regulatory administrators who may have very little or no trade negotiation knowledge or experience. They also have little incentive to concede their power. Whereas trade negotiators are paid to, well, negotiate, regulators are paid to inhibit commerce. They face asymmetric rewards: a huge fuss if something goes wrong, not many kudos if they remove the reins and let commerce thrive. Under those conditions, it should be no surprise that they are risk-averse. So this trade agreement will not be easy to complete. In the meantime, though, there is much the United States can do to limit the ability of regulators to shackle the economy with burdensome—and potentially illegal—requirements that limit choice and expose American businesses to retaliatory sanctions. For example, ensure WTO obligations are taken seriously and adhered to. From our paper:

Prior to implementing a new regulation, federal agencies should be required to evaluate the possibility that less trade-restrictive alternatives could meet regulatory goals as effectively as their preferred proposal. Also, the U.S. government should not dilute or bypass the multilateral rules of the WTO through bilateral or regional negotiations that accept managed protectionism. This paper uses a number of recent examples of protectionist regulations to show that the enemies of regulatory protectionism are transparency and vigilance. Policymakers should be skeptical of regulatory proposals backed by the target domestic industry and of proposals that lack a plausible theory of market failure.

Read the whole thing here. And if you are in D.C. or near a computer next Thursday, watch our event to launch the paper.

As part of their regulation of alcohol sales, an estimated 33 states maintain so-called At Rest laws, which require that bottles spend time in an in-state warehouse before being sold to consumers. The laws limit competition, drive up prices to consumers, and make it harder to special-order less common labels. Now, as the New York Postrevealed in a Sunday exclusive, New York may join the list following generous donations to Gotham politicians from an in-state wholesaler. State Sen. Jeff Klein (D-Bronx) alone got $33,000 from Empire Merchants LLC.

David Waldenberg, of BNP Distributing Co., said 180 small-and medium-sized New York distributors will hurt by the measure.

Those businesses have offices in New York that employ hundreds of people, he said, but use New Jersey storage facilities.

If their warehousing costs go up, these businesses will die and jobs will ultimately be lost, he said.

Update: Tom Wark at WineInterview.com (via Michelle Minton, CEI) believes the New York bill as of this point is “going nowhere” following a vigorous campaign against it by small wholesalers who would be hurt by its provisions.

A Fordham Institute paper released today seeks to answer the question: do private schools really refuse to participate in heavily regulated school choice programs? Its authors tell us that “many proponents of private school choice… take [this] for granted,” citing two examples—one of them being the Cato Institute, whose Center for Educational Freedom I direct. The authors even cite a relevant commentary by former Cato policy analyst Adam Schaeffer.

The only problem is that the cited commentary says precisely the opposite. Describing Indiana’s voucher program, Schaeffer writes: “Because participating schools will have a significant financial advantage over non-participating schools, lightly regulated [non-participating] schools will face increasing financial pressure to participate.” This captures Schaeffer’s concern as well as my own (which I expressed over a decade ago in the political economy journal Independent Review): We do not fear that private schools will refuse to participate in heavily regulated school choice programs. We know that they ultimately will participate, or be driven out of business by their subsidized counterparts.

We know this because there is extensive evidence to that effect from all over the world and across history. Everywhere that private elementary and secondary schools are eligible for government subsidies, the share of unsubsidized school enrollment falls. The higher the subsidy and the longer it has been in place, the more the unsubsidized sector is generally diminished. The Dutch enacted a heavily regulated nationwide voucher program nearly a century ago. Unsubsidized private schooling remains legal, but has been reduced to a statistical asterisk—now making up less than one percent of enrollment, compared to roughly 70 percent for subsidized private schools.

Our reason for concern over this pattern is also grounded in empirical evidence: it is the least regulated, most market-like private schools that do the best job of serving families. That is the consensus of the worldwide within-country research, which I reviewed and tabulated for a 2009 paper in the Journal of School Choice. The Fordham paper does not discuss this evidence.

Despite imputing to Cato scholars the exact opposite of the view we hold, the paper does include some interesting data. In particular, it offers a new corroboration that voucher programs are more heavily regulated than tax credit programs (a difference whose magnitude and statistical significance was previously established here). This will make it even harder for objective observers to cling to the notion that vouchers and credits are functionally equivalent.

Health insurance premiums may as much as double for some small businesses and individual buyers in the U.S. when the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions start in 2014, Aetna Inc. (AET)’s chief executive officer said.

While subsidies in the law will shield some people, other consumers who make too much for assistance are in for “premium rate shock,” Mark Bertolini, who runs the third-biggest U.S. health-insurance company, told analysts yesterday at a conference in New York. The prospect has spurred discussion of having Congress delay or phase in parts of the law, he said.

“We’ve shared it all with the people in Washington and I think it’s a big concern,” the CEO said. “We’re going to see some markets go up as much as as 100 percent.”…

Premiums are likely to increase 25 percent to 50 percent on average in the small-group and individual markets, he said, citing projections by his Hartford, Connecticut-based company.

I can also tell you that, so far, I have detected no serious effort on the part of Democrats to delay anything. Frankly, I think hard core supporters of the new health law and the administration are in denial about what is coming.

I expect more health insurers to be echoing the Aetna comments in coming weeks.

Tennessee faces a decision this week about health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.

I’m not a fan of the law. The more I know, the more harmful I think it will be for small businesses and costly for state governments and the federal government. It does nothing to address the cost of health care in our country. It only expands a broken system…

Since the presidential election, we’ve received 800-plus pages of draft rules from the federal government, some of which actually limit state decisions about running an exchange more than we expected.

The Obama administration has set an aggressive timeline to implement exchanges, while there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the process will actually work. What has concerned me more and more is that they seem to be making this up as they go.

In weighing all of the information we currently have, I informed the federal government today that Tennessee will not run a state-based exchange. If conditions warrant in the future and it makes sense at a later date for Tennessee to run the exchange, we would consider that as an option at the appropriate time.

I conducted an informal survey of a number of insurers…None of the people I talked to are academics or work for a think tank. None of them are in the spin business inside the Beltway. Every one of them has the responsibility for coming up with the correct rates their companies will have to charge…

On average, expect a 30% to 40% increase in the baseline cost of individual health insurance to account for the new premium taxes, reinsurance costs, benefit mandate increases, and underwriting reforms…

In states with the least mandates or for health insurance companies with the tightest underwriting now, the increase could be a lot more…

[E]xpect individual health insurance rates for people in their 20s and early 30s to about double…

Will the feds be ready to provide an insurance exchange in all of the states that don’t have one on October 1, 2013?

I have no idea. And neither does anyone else I talk to inside the Beltway. We only hear vague reports that parts of the new federal exchange information systems are in testing.

The former CIA director couldn’t get away with an affair in this town but the Obama administration has a complete lid on just where they are on health insurance exchanges and haven’t shown any willingness to want to talk about their progress toward launching on time––except to tell us all not to worry.

We are all worried. I would not want to be responsible for the work that remains and only have ten months to do it…

The Republicans said this would not work. If it does not launch on time, or does with serious problems, I would not want to be an incumbent Democrat.

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced it will unilaterally impose a (legally questionable) 3.5-percent premium tax on health plans purchased through the ObamaCare Exchanges it operates.